Eryri, Wales. Cloud inversion on Crib Goch

The light on day one was harsh — flat and bleaching in the valley sections, the kind that empties colour from already-muted October landscapes. There's a derelict structure in the lower valley, half-buried in autumn foliage. I shot it anyway. A waterfall cascading through bracken and red-brown fern. Lichen on rocks so thick it looks permanent, like the mountain grew it deliberately.

Day two was Crib Goch. That's why I was there.

The ridge in mist is a different thing from the ridge in sun. You find it through the cloud first — a rocky peak appearing and vanishing, the path marked by a weathered stone trig point that emerges from nothing. Higher up, someone rests on the rocks above the valley: a mountain goat, not a person, utterly unbothered. The valley below is invisible. Just white.

We'd expected to be in cloud all day. At some point on the ascent, we climbed above it. The cloud dropped and stayed below the ridge. You're standing on the edge of it — the ridge in full October sun, everything below sealed under a flat white ceiling. The Snowdon massif laid out to the west, the cloud pressing into every cwm. I stood on the ridge and pointed the camera at a hiker silhouetted against that cloud-filled valley. The hiker was just walking the ridge. The inversion did the work.

The harsh valley light I wasn't happy with. The inversion justified the trip.

Two mountain lakes sat below in the mist, barely visible. Above them, the ridgeline dropped away in steep sections of varied terrain. On the way back down, a cascading stream in red-brown moorland — the colour the whole valley would have been if the light had held.

Some images I kept even though they're not what I wanted. The landscape was there. The records should be too.